8 minute read
PLATFORM DISCOURSES
Shining a light on tech platforms
Major tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Airbnb have become an integral part of our daily lives, and these companies derive profit from social interactions on their websites. What are the discourses, the language, in which these platforms ask for our trust? This question is central to Dr Niels Niessen’s work in the Platform Discourses project.
Many of the biggest technology companies in the world today are associated not just with commercial products, but also a particular worldview or philosophical outlook. For example, earlier in his career Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto in which he described Facebook as a platform that creates global communities. “It presents Facebook as a platform that helps to connect people all over the world,” says Dr Niels Niessen, a researcher at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History in the Netherlands. While Facebook does indeed help connect people and has an emancipatory function to some extent, ultimately the company is profit-driven, argues Dr Niessen. “Facebook doesn’t care about community, even though it may believe its own story that it does,” he says. “Looking at its structure, it derives profit from the social interactions that people have on it.”
The social interactions of users are also central to the profitability of many other companies in what Dr Niessen describes as the platform economy. This doesn’t mean just social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, but also other major technology businesses such as Airbnb and Apple, now Dr Niessen is analysing the way in which these businesses try to gain the trust of users in the Platform Discourses project. “The project looks at digital online infrastructures. These infrastructures bring users together,” he explains. Alongside these companies, Dr Niessen and his colleagues are also studying several social media platforms. “We’re looking at the likes of Facebook and Apple, but also dating platforms like OkCupid and Tinder,” he says. “These dating platforms represent a different kind of social media platform, that brings customers together.”
Platform discourses project
There are three separate sub-projects within the project as a whole, looking at how tech companies gain the trust of users for the introduction of what can be highly disruptive technologies. Methods of textual and visual analysis are being used to analyse the texts, images and moving images that these companies produce. “For example, Sidewalk Labs – a sister company of Google – was involved in a smart city project in Toronto, which eventually failed. They produced booklets and videos about what a smart city would look like. I look at these and ask; what is Sidewalk Labs’ vision of human life? A second project carried out by Rianne Riemens is on how tech companies talk about the climate crisis, as in Microsoft’s AI for Earth program,” Niessen outlines. “The third sub-project is on voice-user interfaces like Siri, in which my colleague Nuno Atalaia is analysing the way that tech companies introduce these new interfaces.”
How does a tech company like Microsoft presents itself in the climate debate? CREDIT: Screen grab from Microsoft.com. Used with permission from Microsoft.
These types of interfaces are expected to eventually replace the more visual interfaces we are familiar with today to some extent, which would represent a significant change for many people. The wider aim in the project is to build a deeper understanding of the stories that these tech companies produce alongside this type of technology to build trust and gain the consent of the wider public. “These platforms don’t produce just digital infrastructures, but also a worldview,” says Dr Niessen. These worldviews often spring from the core belief that technology can be used to enhance human life, and Dr Niessen himself acknowledges the emancipatory function of social media. “Social media does help connect people, and allows the formation of new kinds of social interactions. Sites like Facebook give voices to minority communities,” he says.
A number of other emancipatory effects have emerged as a result of the rise of social media. For example, with online dating apps it’s now possible for sexual minority groups to more easily meet others of the same orientation facing similar challenges, which Dr Niessen views as a positive change. “That’s a revolution for the better,” he says. This is not however the whole story, and ultimately these platforms are part of a new economic model in which human experience and interaction is datafied. “These platforms generate profits from people’s social interactions, they extract value from everyday experience,” continues Dr Niessen. “In the project we juxtapose the image of humanity that these tech companies produce with what, in our analysis, is actually happening to human life in this platform society.”
This is a reality in which people are often overloaded by information, and hop from project to project. Many of us have grown used to receiving messages through different forms of media throughout the day, which affects the way we focus our attention.“It could be argued that people’s attention is much more scattered than the worldview promoted by companies like Apple would have us believe,” says Dr Niessen. This is related to the fact that the business model of companies like Google and Facebook is to gather data and extract value from human attention. “These huge datasets are profitable for advertising purposes, to find new target audiences and for product development,” continues Dr Niessen. “The two main lines through which data is profitable for these companies are advertising and product development.”
The central question that Dr Niessen and his colleagues are addressing in their research is simply; what is the vision of human life that these platform companies produce? Dr Niessen is critical of these tech discourses, as in his view they don’t match the reality of a digitizing world. “In their book The Costs of Connection, the authors Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias essentially make the argument that market-driven digital platforms function by a colonising logic. They draw a parallel between colonial practices and the platform
society we live in,” he says. Many technology companies promote the view that human beings, through technology, are in control of the world in which we live, a view which Dr Niessen doesn’t wholeheartedly share. “The narrative that problems can be brought under control by more technology can be part of the problem,” he says.
This is partly about resource availability in the light of climate change and wider sustainability concerns, while more broadly Dr Niessen wants to stimulate debate about what these platforms are doing to societies. While there is a general awareness that social media platforms are highly addictive, if they are widely used by friends and family for communication then this makes them difficult to avoid. “As an individual, if all your friends are on a platform it’s very difficult to not join too. I would also say that a platform like Facebook reshapes people’s attention,” explains Dr Niessen. These platforms have become such a ubiquitous part of our daily lives that it may be difficult for many to imagine living without them, but Dr Niessen hopes that alternatives built on different foundations will emerge. “I hope that public alternatives will be created,” he says.
An initiative called Public Spaces has been established in the Netherlands for example, envisioning a version of the internet focused less on economic profit and more on facilitating social interaction, where our online browsing behaviour is not exploited for commercial gain. This is not to suggest that companies like Google and Facebook don’t have a right to exist, but Dr Niessen would like to see more effective regulation and also to heighten awareness among the wider public about how they operate. “I think Facebook can only be regulated effectively at the supranational level, by supra-national bodies like the EU or the US government,” he says.
Apple’s World Gallery campaign (photo by Niels Niessen).
A Critical Humanities Approach to the Texts, Images, and Moving Images Produced by Tech Companies Project Objectives
Platform Discourses analyzes the texts, images, and moving images through which tech companies like Google and Facebook address people not merely as consumers but also as a “public.” The project asks: What is the vision of human life that we find in these discourses? The project juxtaposes this ideological vision to Big Tech’s colonization of everyday life.
Project Funding
Funded by an European Research Council Starting Grant (2019-2024).
Host Institution
Radboud Institute for Culture and History (Nijmegen, The Netherlands).
Contact Details
Principal Investigator, Platform Discourses project Dr Niels Niessen, Ph.D Radboud University Nijmegen Houtlaan 4, 6525 XZ Nijmegen, Netherlands E: niels.niessen@ru.nl W: https://www.ru.nl/english/people/ niessen-n/ W: attentionbook.xyz
Selected publication
Niels Niessen, “Shot on iPhone: Apple’s World Picture,” Advertising and Society Quarterly 22.2 (2021), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797069.
Dr Niels Niessen, Ph.D
Niels Niessen (Ph.D 2013, University of Minnesota) is a researcher in Arts and Culture at Radboud University Nijmegen. At Nijmegen he leads the Platform Discourses research project and he is also the initiator of the Critical Humanities research group. He now works on the book Big Tech and the End of Everyday Life.
